DANCE: BAUHAUS DESIGN BY OSKAR SCHLEMMER

By JACK ANDERSON

Published: January 22, 1984

Oskar Schlemmer's dances were dances that only a painter could have choreographed. Schlemmer, a German painter who lived from 1888 to 1943, both taught and created dances for the Bauhaus, the innovative artistic institution of the 1920's that, in Weimar and later in Dessau, sought a unification of arts, crafts and technology.

Under the auspices of the Kitchen, seven of his dances were successfully revived in 1982 by Debra McCall, a choreographer and dance historian, assisted by Andreas Weininger, a former student at the Bauhaus. These dances, plus two additional reconstructions, were repeated Thursday night at the Guggenheim Museum and the event became a Bauhaus celebration. Mr. Weininger reminisced between dances and the Guggenheim's current exhibition concerns the Bauhaus years of another artist, Vasily Kandinsky.

What made Schlemmer's dances a painter's dances was their preoccupation with mass and volume. In most of them, dancers wearing helmets and encased in costumes resembling the suits of deep-sea divers crossed a stage hung with black curtains, and these bulky costumes emphasized shapes and positions rather than flow or dynamics.

The choreography for ''Figure in Space'' and ''Space Dance'' consisted primarily of moving from point to point and assuming pose after pose. However, the most striking dances united human performers with objects. ''Metal Dance,'' one of the new reconstructions, was dominated by metallic shapes that glaringly reflected the stage light. Into this dazzle a dancer appeared like an animated piece of metal. But the work was so brief that it had the effect of being an apparition, rather than an actual dance.

The cast of ''Form Dance'' carried spheres and wands. The soloist in ''Hoop Dance'' made a set of hoops resemble such things as geometrical figures, the rings of Saturn and a peacock's tail, and the soloist in the even more ingenious ''Pole Dance'' wore black so that he virtually blended with the curtains until all that was fully visible were the intricate designs traced in space by the white poles he manipulated.

Although Schlemmer's dances derived from serious theories, they were often playful in manner. ''Gesture Dance'' parodied formal parties and the ridiculously agitated way the performers in ''Flats Dance,'' the second of the new reconstructions, kept appearing from and disappearing behind rectangles made their antics resemble those of mismatched lovers chasing one another in a farce.

When everyone in ''Block Play'' built a Tower of Babel, one knew that the dance had satirical implications. Yet when that tower teetered but never fell, one also remembered that the Bauhaus fostered utopian visions. The dancers who gave reality to Schlemmer's visions were Brian Hanna, Jan Hanvik, Juliet Neidish and Nancy Ellen Stotz. All deserve congratulations.